C-Beams Glitter (Mega Man X3, Rockman and Forte)
Hello again. Where are we now, January 1996? Best we start wrapping this up, I suppose.
In a sense I never left, of course. Let’s see. Summer of 1995 was the first year of CTY, the big nerd camp that was the defining social framework of late middle school/early high school for me. Place those three weeks between Civilization and Chrono Trigger. I was still playing video games, but favored the PC – I got a Playstation around the time of Final Fantasy VII, and would get a Nintendo 64 for Christmas at the end of 1996, in my first year of high school, but neither captivated me. I was starting to intellectually specialize – at CTY I’d taken what was basically a college-level intro comp course, and was beginning to think of myself as, if not “a writer,” at least “a guy who could write.” This coincided with the regression of my ability in math, previously my best subject, as the handwriting requirements of algebra and ADD-taxing nature of drilling a problem over and over again made the subject stop favoring me. Indeed, the best paper I wrote at CTY was a descriptive essay about how much I’d hated my 7th grade math teacher. (Meanwhile, I got on quite well with my 7th grade English teacher, and ran into her at the supermarket earlier this year.) From there I’d gradually deflect from aspiring towards fiction to realizing a greater strength in criticism, a bias I’ve yet to correct despite occasional efforts.
But my exile from the Super Nintendo era was short-lived. The summer of 1997 introduced me to the wonders of NESticle, and I dove happily into the suddenly opened archives of my childhood. Then, in the fall of 1998, I got my learner’s permit, and early in 1999 could drive. This being western Connecticut, the main available attraction was the same thing it had been since the 1980s evenings spent with my mother: the Danbury Fair Mall. Or, in my specific case, the Funcoland about a block further down Backus Avenue, where I dove into a more materialist phase of retrogaming by picking up a NES and, not long after, a SNES.
Which is to say that there was a period of my life these games belonged to. Both of them were admittedly on the tricky end. Mega Man X3 was late enough in the SNES lifecycle that it was a relatively rare cartridge that coust upwards of $40 – I didn’t get to it until college when I’m pretty sure I drove upwards of forty-five minutes to a Gamestop that had one. Rockman and Forte, on the other hand, was originally an emulation concern – I remember playing it on the eOne my mother had bought on a lark, which probably means in early 2000. (I remember being baffled by a bug where jumping would simply fail on occasion, which I finally, after extensive testing, traced to the cheap keyboard that shipped with the flagrant iMac knockoff, which was apparently wired so that a particular key combination that was common when playing a side-scroller with the arrow keys would lock out a handful of other keys.)…
Meaning, as distinct from information, is an entirely human creation. It does not exist ‘out there’. It is an emergent property of human existence, of animals which have consciousness, which is itself a system of reflections of reflections. The essence of conscious human awareness is the experience of looking at something or someone, and knowing that you are looking at them, and thus looking at your own looking. It is the awareness of a hall of mirrors inside your head. And then one becomes aware of the returned look of the other, and the implied hall of mirrors inside their heads. And then one imagines their mirrors mirroring your mirrors. Their infinite regression amplifies your own. And it is this multiplicity of reflections, and of reflections of reflections, that ignites the quest for meaning. 
We’re pleased to announce a new episode of Pex Lives. The description follows:
Reflecting on the fact that his last book was going to turn out to be the relatively slender and small-scale 
ed me off of the Firefly podcast, mostly because listening to me kvetch about sci-fi westerns and the American Confederacy is way more fun for me than for her, but thankfully for all listeners she’s replaced me with the wonderful Jessica from 
I am not a huge Bob Dylan fan. Was into him for a couple months in high school/college when I was in a big folk music phase, but I liked folk music for being melodious and pretty, and that tended to mean that I preferred Dylan when someone like Peter, Paul, and Mary were singing him. Still, for the most part I’m even less of a fan of the arguments against him winning the Nobel Prize for literature, which tend to fall into two camps, both fairly appalling. The first is the outright snobbery, whether in its hilariously cliche form of “but what about Philip Roth” or in its more jocular but still fundamentally wrong-headed “does this mean X can win a Grammy?” My distaste for this position isn’t going to surprise anyone. Indeed, I consider it actively evil, albeit in a smoldering, unremarkable sense as opposed to something pernicious and large-scale like, say, Donald Trump.